Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors

Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800

Jonathan Karam Skaff

Description

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors challenges readers to reconsider China's relations with the rest of Eurasia. Investigating interstate competition and cooperation between the successive Sui and Tang dynasties and Turkic states of Mongolia from 580 to 800, Jonathan Skaff upends the notion that inhabitants of China and Mongolia were irreconcilably different and hostile to each other. Rulers on both sides deployed strikingly similar diplomacy, warfare, ideologies of rulership, and patrimonial political networking to seek hegemony over each other and the peoples living in the pastoral borderlands between them. The book particularly disputes the supposed uniqueness of imperial China's tributary diplomacy by demonstrating that similar customary norms of interstate relations existed in a wide sphere in Eurasia as far west as Byzantium, India, and Iran. These previously unrecognized cultural connections, therefore, were arguably as much the work of Turko-Mongol pastoral nomads traversing the Eurasian steppe as the more commonly recognized Silk Road monks and merchants. This interdisciplinary and multi-perspective study will appeal to readers of comparative and world history, especially those interested in medieval warfare, diplomacy, and cultural studies.

Sui-Tang China and Its Turko-Mongol Neighbors

Culture, Power, and Connections, 580-800

Jonathan Karam Skaff

Reviews and Awards

"Skaff has written a sophisticated study of Sui-Tang China and its northern and western neighbors that were active in the eastern half of Eurasia."--CHOICE

"This book offers a powerful rethinking of Tang China's relations with its neighbors. Where earlier analysts saw profound cultural differences between the Chinese and their nomadic rivals, Skaff brilliantly and persuasively demonstrates that a shared set of Eurasian cultural patterns underlay all their actions. Must reading for anyone interested in China's place in world history."-Valerie Hansen, Yale University

"It is impossible to gain an accurate understanding of medieval Chinese history without reference to the steppe peoples to the north and northwest of the East Asian Heartland. Jonathan Skaff's book, with its unabashedly comparative and cross-disciplinary approach, remarkably comprehensive coverage, and minutely detailed treatment, masterfully achieves this integrationist goal, without losing sight of institutional traditions and ethnic realities." --Victor H. Mair, University of Pennsylvania